Monday, March 4, 2013

Erdoğan inverts reality

Erdoğan inverts reality

News item:

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday waded into the controversy over comments by Turkey’s prime minister equating Zionism to a crime against humanity, rebuking the leader of the NATO ally by saying such remarks complicate efforts to find peace in the Middle East.

Kerry said the Obama administration found the statements by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “objectionable” and he stressed the “urgent need to promote a spirit of tolerance, and that includes all of the public statements made by all leaders” at a news conference in Ankara with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

“We not only disagree with it; we found it objectionable,” Kerry said.

Far be it from me to be unappreciative when our administration does something positive. Erdoğan’s statement was indeed ‘objectionable’, although I find the formulation that it “complicates efforts to find peace” somewhat stupid. As if that’s the issue!The problem is that the statement is far more than just objectionable. Because if Zionism is a crime against humanity, then the existence of the Jewish state is also a crime, a crime committed by the Jewish people, and the only acceptable redress for the ‘victims’ of this crime is to take the state away from the Jews and give it to them.Erdoğan is inverting reality. The truth is that the Jewish people suffered centuries of oppression and mistreatment in their diaspora, and finally succeeded in returning home. In a rare moment of collective moral clarity, the nations of the world recognized the rightness of this solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ and implemented it in the declaration of the Palestine Mandate. Although this moral moment was short — the British quickly fell back into darkness and tried to prevent the creation of a Jewish state — it came into being despite their efforts.Since then, the enemies of the Jewish state and the Jewish people have been trying, by increasingly sophisticated means including war, terrorism, and lately a combination of these with a carefully planned and executed diplomatic and psychological assault aimed at Israel’s supporters and Israelis themselves, to reverse history and re-disperse the Jewish people.Reality inversion is a tactic that has proven especially effective. So a ficticious ‘people’, the ‘Palestinians’, is created out of heterogeneous Arabs, a false history is created for them, and Jewish history and provenance in the land of Israel is denied. These Palestinians are falsely cast as victims of oppression, expulsion and genocide, when this is both the historical experience of the Jewish people and what their enemies are trying to perpetrate against them yet again.Israel is accused of targeting children and noncombatants, committing terrorism, establishing an apartheid regime, being racist. But of course it is (for example) the PLO, Hamas and Hizballah who target civilians and children, and who are proud to announce that when ‘Palestine’ is declared, no Jews will live in it.Self-defense by Jews is particularly offensive to their enemies — because, you see, how dare we claim to have a right of self-defense when we are not on the same level of humanity as our attackers — so Erdoğan was especially infuriated by the short Gaza war of 2008-9, and even more by the self-defense by Israeli commandos against the thugs that tried to kill them on the deck of the Mavi Marmara.It is important for possibly naive Westerners (including Israeli officials) to grasp that it really doesn’t matter if Israel had a right to intercept the ships, who provoked the violence on the Mavi Marmara, what weapons they had, who fired the first shots or whether the Israelis had any options short of live fire. It is always unthinkable for Jews to kill Muslims, in this case Turks!The existence of a Jewish state in the ‘Muslim Middle East’ is a similar affront to Arab and Muslim manhood. So in a way it is natural for them to invert reality and see our defensive actions as aggression. But it is also a deliberate tactic, a form of ‘big lie’ technique.The struggle to destroy the Jewish state that has been carried out since 1948, and which has now reached a truly remarkable degree of sophistication, is in fact the ongoing crime against humanity. The greatest reality inversion of all is to present this extended war against the Jewish people, this multifaceted enterprise that is intended to result in the end of the only Jewish state and probably yet another genocide, as a positive struggle on behalf of the ‘Palestinians’!